Montréal is 2nd global artificial intelligence hub

Which cities are bound to become the next global AI hubs? Becoming Human blog deliberated on that question and has determined the four main factors that it calls the four Gs:

Giants: Big companies such as Facebook and Google are strategically betting on certain cities, where they are investing heavily in start-ups.

Gurus: The AI universe is converging around a few key professors who are doing fundamental research while usually working for one of the Giants. Nearly every machine learning engineer is influenced by this small group of researchers.

Greenhorns: Hundreds of AI start-ups have emerged in the past few years, clustering in key locations.

Gaps: Where are the actual AI jobs today? AI jobs are mainly clustered in seven cities.

Based on these factors, the four cities that are becoming global AI hubs are:

San Francisco

Montréal

Seattle

Toronto

Montréal—The Talent Magnet

Montréal has the cream of the crop in AI talent.

The city is home to legendary AI Godfather Yoshua Bengio, Université de Montréal professor and head of the Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). Along with Université de Montréal and McGill University, MILA does academic research driven by over 150 cutting-edge AI researchers, the largest concentration of its kind in the world.

What’s more, Montréal already has a budding ecosystem. The Institute for Data Valorization (IVADO) uses its nearly $230 million in funding to do applied research, while Element.AI (with $103 million in funding) incubates start-ups. Many big companies have also set up AI labs here, including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, IBM, and Facebook.

With staunch support from the Canadian government and plenty of AI Gurus, more and more Giants will be emerging from Montréal.